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"one of the largest criminal investigations currently underway in the world."

"Like any other case, we charge cases that we can prove beyond a reasonable doubt," Worthy said. "We do not charge cases that we cannot prove beyond a reasonable doubt, so we are confident in all charges that we have meted out today."

Like Snyder, former Flint Public Works director Howard Croft pleaded not guilty Thursday to two counts of willful neglect of duty. The charges against Snyder and Croft -- which first came to light in court documents Wednesday -- are misdemeanors, punishable with up to one year in prison or a fine of up to $1,000, according to the state's penal code.

Among the others who face charges is Nicholas Lyon, the former director of the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, who faces nine counts of involuntary manslaughter -- each a felony punishable by up to 15 years in prison -- and one count of willful neglect of duty.

Eden Wells, the state's former chief medical executive, faces nine counts of involuntary manslaughter, one count of willful neglect of duty and two counts of misconduct in office, each punishable by up to 5 years in prison.

“There are no excuses. The governor long ago knew about the lead in Flint’s water. He did nothing. As a result, hundreds of children were poisoned. Thousands may have been exposed to potential brain damage from lead.

Sanders' main rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, Hillary Clinton, has also called for an explanation of what Snyder's administration knew and said that the situation was "unconscionable."

The former Secretary of State has also called on Michigan to pay for water purchases from Detroit for Flint residents until their water is safe again.

"The best thing for the people of Flint is that every effort is focused on solving this emergency, getting the aid needed to help the residents, and ensuring that clean drinkable water is restored to the city," he said in a statement.

If Republicans are building the infrastructure to subvert an election — to make it possible to overturn results or keep Democrats from claiming electoral votes — then we have to expect that given a chance, they’ll use it.

Several states in the Northeast also have among the country’s worst outbreaks now. Connecticut, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, among others, are all experiencing marked rises in case counts, and labs have identified both the B.1.1.7 variant and large shares of another variant, B.1.526.

The B.1.526 variant, which first appeared in New York City in samples from November, appears in two forms: one with a mutation that may help the virus evade antibodies and another that may help it bind more tightly to human cells.

The outbreak in the Northeast is currently much worse than it is in California, but California faces a variant of its own that makes up a large share of cases.

Studies have indicated the variant first discovered in California, B.1.427/B.1.429, may also be more transmissible than earlier forms of the virus, but it does not appear to spread as quickly as B.1.1.7.

Like the variant first discovered in New York City, the B.1.427/B.1.429 variant has also been seen in high levels in neighboring states, including Arizona, but does not yet make up a significant number of cases outside the region.

In Michigan, Covid-19 hospitalizations are already more than three times higher than they were a month ago. Other states with rising cases are also seeing significant increases in hospitalized Covid-19 patients.

The vaccine rollout continues to speed up, and recent studies confirm that vaccines are effective against the coronavirus in the real world, giving experts hope that an end may be in sight. But with increased transmission, they say, comes a renewed need for caution in the immediate term.

“I think we’ve got to hang on just a little bit longer, being conservative and getting more people vaccinated,” Dr. Martin said. “I’d hate to see us having another hospital surge when we’re getting so close to being done with this. I’m definitely worried about it.”

This past week in Pennsylvania, authorities did make one arrest based on an accusation the Trump campaign first leveled in November. Delaware County prosecutors said a man named Bruce Bartman cast an absentee ballot in his deceased mother’s name — for Mr. Trump. Mr. Bartman’s lawyer said Mr. Bartman had done so as a misguided “form of protest,” and the local prosecutor said it was nothing more than “evidence that one person committed voter fraud.”

The most thorough debunking of Ms. Powell’s conspiracies came last week in a blistering letter from Dominion that affirmed the integrity of its machines, which has been verified in independent audits. The company demanded she retract her statements and accused her of engaging in “a reckless disinformation campaign.”

Mr. Trump devoted Saturday to four rallies across the state, and he and Mr. Biden planned campaign events for the final 48 hours of the race as well, with a wave of prominent Democrats and celebrities slated to arrive

In Pennsylvania in particular, the possibility of extended court battles and confusion hangs over the race, with the state Republican Party hoping the Supreme Court will reconsider its decision last week to allow the state to continue receiving absentee ballots for three days after Election Day.

The Texas Supreme Court denied an effort by Republicans to throw out more than 120,000 votes that had been cast at drive-through locations in Harris County, an increasingly Democratic area anchored in Houston.

in Dubuque, Iowa, on Sunday, Mr. Trump claimed, inaccurately, that the result of the election was always determined on Election Day. “We should know the result of the election on Nov. 3,” he said. “The evening of Nov. 3. That’s the way it’s been and that’s the way it should be. What’s going on in this country?”

Mr. Trump entered the final hours of the race in a worse position here than he was four years ago, when Pennsylvania was seen as Hillary Clinton’s firewall. This time, Mr. Biden has a lead of six points, according to a new New York Times/Siena College poll released Sunday, and is working to create multiple pathways to 270 electoral votes.

Mr. Trump’s lagging position in the race was evident in his grueling travel schedule that had him shoring up votes in five states he won four years ago — Michigan, Iowa, North Carolina, Georgia and Florida.His final rally of the day was scheduled for 11 p.m., and risked violating a midnight curfew in Miami-Dade County.Mr. Biden, by contrast, set his sights squarely on Pennsylvania on Sunday, an approach he will repeat again Monday, along with a foray into Ohio, a state Mr. Trump won handily in 2016 but that polls show could be more competitive now.

Compared with other swing states, such as Florida, far fewer early ballots have already been cast in Pennsylvania and, according to the U.S. Elections Project, as of Sunday there were more than 350,000 absentee ballots that had been requested by Democratic voters that had yet to be returned.

Mr. Biden’s Philadelphia events kicked off a last push through the state over the final two days. On Monday, Mr. Biden, Senator Kamala Harris and their spouses are expected to campaign in five media markets, hoping to cement support across a sprawling coalition and to keep Mr. Trump’s margins down in parts of western Pennsylvania that propelled him to victory in 2016.“My message is simple,” Mr. Biden said Sunday. “Pennsylvania is critical in this election.”

Democrats are well aware of how devoted Mr. Trump’s core base remains. In Macomb County in Michigan, where the president held his first rally Sunday, Irwin Patterson was selling Trump merchandise at a makeshift roadside store.

He also embraced the actions of some of his supporters in Texas who had surrounded a Biden campaign bus with their vehicles on Saturday, in an apparent attempt to slow it down and run it off the road. Mr. Trump claimed the vehicles were “protecting his bus, yesterday, because they are nice.”

Mr. Biden countered with his own warning later Sunday, saying, “The president is not going to steal this election.”

That lead, however, isn’t enough to make Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans feel fully confident about the state of the race in Pennsylvania.

The Trump campaign ads running in Pennsylvania have been overwhelmingly centered on economic messages, mainly jobs and taxes.

Pennsylvania’s economy is emerging from the pandemic recession but still has a long road ahead to its pre-crisis state. Like the nation, it has seen a two-track recovery that has left small businesses and low-earning workers behind.

“That blue wall has to be re-established,” Mr. Biden said in another recent Pennsylvania campaign appearance. He said that winning the state meant a “great deal to me, personally as well as politically.”

Pennsylvania has long loomed large in the psyche of the Biden campaign. Mr. Biden, a Scranton native, gave his first speech of his presidential campaign in Pittsburgh, and he chose Philadelphia for his campaign headquarters, before the pandemic hit.

Pennsylvania saw its unemployment rate fall to 8.1 percent in September, according to the Labor Department, nearly identical to the national rate of 7.9 percent.

PHILADELPHIA — As the national early vote climbs past a staggering 93 million and challenges to the electoral process intensify across states, President Trump and Joseph R. Biden Jr. are barreling into Pennsylvania and turning it into the top battleground in Tuesday’s election, with Democrats flooding in with door-knockers and Republicans trying to parlay Mr. Trump’s rallies into big turnout once again.

Pennsylvania has more Electoral College votes, 20, than any other traditional battleground except Florida, and Mr. Trump won the state by less than one percentage point in 2016.

Mr. Biden is ahead with a modest margin in recent polls, and is trying to cut into the president’s turnout in rural counties. But Mr. Trump’s rallies have energized many Republican voters, and his team is already preparing legal challenges over the vote if it ends up being close.

“Every day is a new reminder of how high the stakes are, how far the other side will go to try to suppress the turnout,” Mr. Biden said as he campaigned here Sunday. “Especially here in Philadelphia. President Trump is terrified of what will happen in Pennsylvania.”

Some Trump supporters also turned disruptive on Sunday: Vehicles bearing Trump flags halted traffic on the Garden State Parkway in New Jersey; local officials said the motorcade backed up traffic for several miles. In Georgia, a rally for Democrats that had been scheduled was canceled, with organizers citing worries over what they feared was a “large militia presence” drawn by Mr. Trump’s own event nearby.

Throughout his final sprint of rallies, Mr. Trump has moved to baselessly sow doubt about the integrity of the electoral process.

Mr. Biden, by contrast, set his sights squarely on Pennsylvania on Sunday, an approach he will repeat again Monday, along with a foray into Ohio, a state Mr. Trump won handily in 2016 but that polls show could be more competitive now.

Democrats are well aware of how devoted Mr. Trump’s core base remains. In Macomb County in Michigan, where the president held his first rally Sunday, Irwin Patterson was selling Trump merchandise at a makeshift roadside store.

Later, he tweeted in response to the news that the F.B.I. was investigating the incident that “in my opinion, these patriots did nothing wrong,” adding that federal authorities should be scrutinizing antifa instead.

Of the three big Northern swing states Mr. Trump won by a hair four years ago, the once reliably blue state of Pennsylvania is the one his advisers believe is most likely within his reach. That’s in large part because of the support of rural voters and Mr. Biden’s call for eventually phasing out fossil fuels, an unpopular stance for many voters in a state with a large natural gas industry.

The Trump campaign ads running in Pennsylvania have been overwhelmingly centered on economic messages, mainly jobs and taxes. The campaign’s most aired ad in Pennsylvania over the past week has been a negative ad claiming Mr. Biden will raise taxes (he has said he will raise taxes for those making over $400,000).

But the Biden campaign has not ceded the subject to the president, with 14 different ads on air that touch on jobs and the economy. Its most aired ad in Pennsylvania over the past week featured a Biden speech outlining his plans for pandemic recovery, including jobs. Another ad directly rebuts the Trump campaign’s attacks on his tax plan.

Pennsylvania saw its unemployment rate fall to 8.1 percent in September, according to the Labor Department, nearly identical to the national rate of 7.9 percent. That is a significant improvement from the 16.1 percent unemployment it posted in April. But the state still had 380,000 fewer jobs in September than it did in September of 2019, and there are 18 percent fewer small businesses open here compared to a year ago, according to data compiled by the economists at Opportunity Insights.

Signs of a Biden win: If the polls are right and the count is on track, Mr. Biden is probably getting a Wisconsin and Nevada call on election night. Georgia’s another possibility — if Mr. Biden is going to win the state, he has probably caught up to Mr. Trump by now. If the night’s going really well for Mr. Biden, maybe he’s still competitive or even leading in Iowa, Ohio or Texas.AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyMichigan and Pennsylvania? Well, we’re just going to have to wait and see. Of the two, Michigan seems more plausible.Exactly where will the count stand in Michigan and Pennsylvania if Mr. Biden’s on track for victory? It depends on how many absentee ballots they get through, of course. If they haven’t counted many mail ballots, Mr. Trump could even lead by double digits.The better measure: Focus on any counties that manage to wrap up their count. I’d guess some will get pretty close. If Mr. Biden’s winning, he will start to outrun Mrs. Clinton’s 2016 showing in the counties that get through their mail votes. That could be the tell.Signs of a Trump win: If the president’s on track, the race in Nevada and Wisconsin might be too close to call. Even if he eventually loses Wisconsin, he might hold on to the lead all the way until we get the absentees from Milwaukee. He probably already got the call in that long list of states where Mr. Biden’s hoping to squeak out a win, like Ohio and so on.The most important sign would be a lead in Pennsylvania and Michigan. In Pennsylvania, it could easily be a double-digit lead, depending on just how many absentee ballots have been counted. With Mr. Biden holding such a commanding lead among the third of the electorate that voted early, a Trump win most likely involves a double-digit victory on Election Day — and a double-digit lead in the count, late into the night.

But the persistence of the president and loyal Republicans has alarmed Black leaders, civil rights activists and historians who see an unprecedented attempt to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of voters, many of them Black.

To many civil rights advocates, this is another grim chapter in what they see as an expansive, decades-long effort by Republicans to gain more power by suppressing the votes of people of color.

A group of Michigan voters has also filed a lawsuit against Trump and his campaign, arguing that "defendants are openly seeking to disenfranchise Black voters,"

The plaintiffs, who are represented by lawyers from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, allege that the Trump campaign has attempted mass voter suppression by pressuring election officials into not certifying the election results in their state, and that Trump's apparent attempt to pressure Michigan election officials and state lawmakers was a violation of the provision against voter intimidation included in the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Trump and his allies have made similar efforts in Pennsylvania, with false claims about widespread voter fraud in Philadelphia.

But Bob Bauer, a senior legal adviser to the Biden campaign, said the Trump campaign's "targeting of the African American community is not subtle. It is extraordinary" and that "it's quite remarkable how brazen it is."

"It is difficult for me to think of another president in modern time who has literally driven a national scheme to disenfranchise Black voters and other voters of color en masse, in the way that we see with these post-election lawsuits," said Kristin Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. S

the Trump campaign was aided by supporters and allies across the country in his failed efforts to reverse Biden's victory.

"It's only because of the environment that was created by this president to defy the rule of law, to destroy customs and practices, and to really push people toward a sense of tribalism that's not in our economic interest, that's not in the interest of democracy, for his own selfish and self-reflecting outcome,"

The effort that Trump is undertaking, she said, is a new type of attempted voter suppression in which the president is attempting to invalidate ballots that have already been counted.

"I think he has targeted heavily African American cities because they happen to be heavily Democratic cities, and if he's going to invalidate enough votes to turn the election in his favor, this would actually be the best place to do it," Gillespie said.

voters of color, faced unprecedented obstacles to cast ballots due to the coronavirus pandemic.

With the election challenges serving as a sort of punctuation mark on all of that, Clarke said, "I think this will stand out in the history books as one of the darkest moments in our nation's history."

Did Trump follow his own advice to Whitmer by offering to "make a deal" or "give a little, and put out the fire"? Nope. Instead, as Trump is prone to do, he added to the flames instead.

"They were just there to cause trouble."

Trump conjuring up imagery from the civil rights era doesn't seem like a coincidence: On Thursday night he tweeted an infamous 1967 quote from a white Southern police chief who had been known for his brutal policies to the black community: "when the looting starts, the shooting starts." (Trump walked back the tweet Friday afternoon after a backlash in the media and after Twitter flagged the tweet as "glorifying violence.")

versky died in 1996. Kahneman won the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics for the work the two men did together, which he summarized in his 2011 best seller, Thinking, Fast and Slow. Another best seller, last year’s The Undoing Project, by Michael Lewis, tells the story of the sometimes contentious collaboration between Tversky and Kahneman

Another key figure in the field is the University of Chicago economist Richard Thaler. One of the biases he’s most linked with is the endowment effect, which leads us to place an irrationally high value on our possessions.

In an experiment conducted by Thaler, Kahneman, and Jack L. Knetsch, half the participants were given a mug and then asked how much they would sell it for. The average answer was $5.78. The rest of the group said they would spend, on average, $2.21 for the same mug. This flew in the face of classic economic theory, which says that at a given time and among a certain population, an item has a market value that does not depend on whether one owns it or not. Thaler won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Economics.

“The question that is most often asked about cognitive illusions is whether they can be overcome. The message … is not encouraging.”

Kahneman and others draw an analogy based on an understanding of the Müller-Lyer illusion, two parallel lines with arrows at each end. One line’s arrows point in; the other line’s arrows point out. Because of the direction of the arrows, the latter line appears shorter than the former, but in fact the two lines are the same length.

In this context, his pessimism relates, first, to the impossibility of effecting any changes to System 1—the quick-thinking part of our brain and the one that makes mistaken judgments tantamount to the Müller-Lyer line illusion

that’s not so easy in the real world, when we’re dealing with people and situations rather than lines. “Unfortunately, this sensible procedure is least likely to be applied when it is needed most,” Kahneman writes. “We would all like to have a warning bell that rings loudly whenever we are about to make a serious error, but no such bell is available.”

Because biases appear to be so hardwired and inalterable, most of the attention paid to countering them hasn’t dealt with the problematic thoughts, judgments, or predictions themselves

Is it really impossible, however, to shed or significantly mitigate one’s biases? Some studies have tentatively answered that question in the affirmative.

what if the person undergoing the de-biasing strategies was highly motivated and self-selected? In other words, what if it was me?

I met with Kahneman

Confirmation bias shows up most blatantly in our current political divide, where each side seems unable to allow that the other side is right about anything.

Over an apple pastry and tea with milk, he told me, “Temperament has a lot to do with my position. You won’t find anyone more pessimistic than I am.”

“I see the picture as unequal lines,” he said. “The goal is not to trust what I think I see. To understand that I shouldn’t believe my lying eyes.” That’s doable with the optical illusion, he said, but extremely difficult with real-world cognitive biases.

he most effective check against them, as Kahneman says, is from the outside: Others can perceive our errors more readily than we can.

“slow-thinking organizations,” as he puts it, can institute policies that include the monitoring of individual decisions and predictions. They can also require procedures such as checklists and “premortems,”

A premortem attempts to counter optimism bias by requiring team members to imagine that a project has gone very, very badly and write a sentence or two describing how that happened. Conducting this exercise, it turns out, helps people think ahead.

“My position is that none of these things have any effect on System 1,” Kahneman said. “You can’t improve intuition.

Perhaps, with very long-term training, lots of talk, and exposure to behavioral economics, what you can do is cue reasoning, so you can engage System 2 to follow rules. Unfortunately, the world doesn’t provide cues. And for most people, in the heat of argument the rules go out the window.

Kahneman describes an even earlier Nisbett article that showed subjects’ disinclination to believe statistical and other general evidence, basing their judgments instead on individual examples and vivid anecdotes. (This bias is known as base-rate neglect.)

over the years, Nisbett had come to emphasize in his research and thinking the possibility of training people to overcome or avoid a number of pitfalls, including base-rate neglect, fundamental attribution error, and the sunk-cost fallacy.

we’ve tested Michigan students over four years, and they show a huge increase in ability to solve problems. Graduate students in psychology also show a huge gain.”

about half give the right answer: the law of large numbers, which holds that outlier results are much more frequent when the sample size (at bats, in this case) is small. Over the course of the season, as the number of at bats increases, regression to the mean is inevitabl

When Nisbett asks the same question of students who have completed the statistics course, about 70 percent give the right answer. He believes this result shows, pace Kahneman, that the law of large numbers can be absorbed into System 2—and maybe into System 1 as well, even when there are minimal cues.

Nisbett’s second-favorite example is that economists, who have absorbed the lessons of the sunk-cost fallacy, routinely walk out of bad movies and leave bad restaurant meals uneaten.

When Nisbett has to give an example of his approach, he usually brings up the baseball-phenom survey. This involved telephoning University of Michigan students on the pretense of conducting a poll about sports, and asking them why there are always several Major League batters with .450 batting averages early in a season, yet no player has ever finished a season with an average that high.

, “I know from my own research on teaching people how to reason statistically that just a few examples in two or three domains are sufficient to improve people’s reasoning for an indefinitely large number of events.”

isbett suggested another factor: “You and Amos specialized in hard problems for which you were drawn to the wrong answer. I began to study easy problems, which you guys would never get wrong but untutored people routinely do … Then you can look at the effects of instruction on such easy problems, which turn out to be huge.”

Nisbett suggested that I take “Mindware: Critical Thinking for the Information Age,” an online Coursera course in which he goes over what he considers the most effective de-biasing skills and concepts. Then, to see how much I had learned, I would take a survey he gives to Michigan undergraduates. So I did.

he course consists of eight lessons by Nisbett—who comes across on-screen as the authoritative but approachable psych professor we all would like to have had—interspersed with some graphics and quizzes. I recommend it. He explains the availability heuristic this way: “People are surprised that suicides outnumber homicides, and drownings outnumber deaths by fire. People always think crime is increasing” even if it’s not.

When I finished the course, Nisbett sent me the survey he and colleagues administer to Michigan undergrads

It contains a few dozen problems meant to measure the subjects’ resistance to cognitive biases

I got it right. Indeed, when I emailed my completed test, Nisbett replied, “My guess is that very few if any UM seniors did as well as you. I’m sure at least some psych students, at least after 2 years in school, did as well. But note that you came fairly close to a perfect score.”

In 2006, seeking to prevent another mistake of that magnitude, the U.S. government created the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (iarpa), an agency designed to use cutting-edge research and technology to improve intelligence-gathering and analysis. In 2011, iarpa initiated a program, Sirius, to fund the development of “serious” video games that could combat or mitigate what were deemed to be the six most damaging biases: confirmation bias, fundamental attribution error, the bias blind spot (the feeling that one is less biased than the average person), the anchoring effect, the representativeness heuristic, and projection bias (the assumption that everybody else’s thinking is the same as one’s own).

For his part, Nisbett insisted that the results were meaningful. “If you’re doing better in a testing context,” he told me, “you’ll jolly well be doing better in the real world.”

The New York–based NeuroLeadership Institute offers organizations and individuals a variety of training sessions, webinars, and conferences that promise, among other things, to use brain science to teach participants to counter bias. This year’s two-day summit will be held in New York next month; for $2,845, you could learn, for example, “why are our brains so bad at thinking about the future, and how do we do it better?”

Philip E. Tetlock, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, and his wife and research partner, Barbara Mellers, have for years been studying what they call “superforecasters”: people who manage to sidestep cognitive biases and predict future events with far more accuracy than the pundits

One of the most important ingredients is what Tetlock calls “the outside view.” The inside view is a product of fundamental attribution error, base-rate neglect, and other biases that are constantly cajoling us into resting our judgments and predictions on good or vivid stories instead of on data and statistics

most promising are a handful of video games. Their genesis was in the Iraq War

Nevertheless, I did not feel that reading Mindware and taking the Coursera course had necessarily rid me of my biases

Together with collaborators who included staff from Creative Technologies, a company specializing in games and other simulations, and Leidos, a defense, intelligence, and health research company that does a lot of government work, Morewedge devised Missing. Some subjects played the game, which takes about three hours to complete, while others watched a video about cognitive bias. All were tested on bias-mitigation skills before the training, immediately afterward, and then finally after eight to 12 weeks had passed.

he said he saw the results as supporting the research and insights of Richard Nisbett. “Nisbett’s work was largely written off by the field, the assumption being that training can’t reduce bias,

“The literature on training suggests books and classes are fine entertainment but largely ineffectual. But the game has very large effects. It surprised everyone.”

even the positive results reminded me of something Daniel Kahneman had told me. “Pencil-and-paper doesn’t convince me,” he said. “A test can be given even a couple of years later. But the test cues the test-taker. It reminds him what it’s all about.”

Morewedge told me that some tentative real-world scenarios along the lines of Missing have shown “promising results,” but that it’s too soon to talk about them.

In the future, I will monitor my thoughts and reactions as best I can

A recount would have to reverse the results in all three states to get Clinton to two hundred and seventy. And, as fivethirtyeight.com noted, this has never happened in cases where the margins are as large as those in Wisconsin or Pennsylvania; even Michigan would be at the edge of past experience.

Stein’s Wisconsin application lists a number of reasons for a recount, most of which are paraphrases of a single thought: the Russians might, just might, have fixed the election

The only example of observable irregularities that Stein cites is an uptick in absentee voting, something that may have many causes.

There have also been reports pointing to a weaker performance for Clinton in counties with paperless balloting; however, as both fivethirtyeight.com and the Upshot have pointed out, any difference disappears when one controls for demographics.

It has been widely noted that Clinton did not visit Wisconsin in the general election. The results may have been “surprising,” but they are not mysterious.

Nate Silver gave Trump close to a one-in-three chance of winning. And, as the Obama Administration confirmed this weekend, there is no sign of interference in the balloting.

written by its attorney Marc Elias, which said that the campaign took concerns about Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania “very seriously,” especially given that “this election cycle was unique in the degree of foreign interference witnessed throughout the campaign.”

“lawyers and data scientists and analysts combing over the results to spot anomalies that would suggest a hacked result”; of meetings with data scientists; of researching recount and audit rules; of an attempt “to systematically catalogue and investigate every theory that has been presented to us.”

On Sunday morning, Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s campaign manager, responded to the recount calls by pointing to how outraged the Clinton campaign was when Trump said, during the debates, that he couldn’t say whether he’d accept the results.

When it comes to combating Trump, one must take particular care not to join him in the land of conspiracies, however intellectually engaging or emotionally satisfying that may be. One has to start, instead, by holding fast to the truth.

Stanley B. Greenberg, whose research in Macomb County in the 1980s popularized the term “Reagan Democrat,” said Mr. Trump might put the Rust Belt into play. “There’s no doubt there’s new voters coming into the Republican primary process,” he said.But Mr. Greenberg added that there was an equal potential for a backlash in an electorate that is more racially and culturally diverse. “The country’s changed pretty dramatically from the time when Reagan Democrats were calling the shots,” he said.

Detroit’s automakers are experiencing record sales.Nonetheless, the narrative of decline is pervasive, especially because many of the new jobs being created pay far less.“We’ve got McDonald’s and Burger King jobs, and that’s about it,” said Mr. Reidt, the fire captain.

Stabenow and Peters say federal funding is needed to replace aging pipes in Flint and other parts of the infrastructure to ensure public safety and restore confidence in the water system in the Michigan city.

It would authorize the federal Drinking Water State Revolving Fund to make up to $100 million in grants between now and October 2017 "to any state that receives an emergency declaration ... to a public health threat from lead or other contaminants in a public drinking water system."

The bill also authorizes $50 million for public health — though that funding is not specific to Flint — including $17.5 million to monitor the health effects of lead contamination in municipal water, along with allowing Michigan to use other funding to repay earlier federal loans taken out by Flint for work on its water system.

While Lee said, however, that Gov. Rick Snyder hadn’t asked Congress to authorize emergency funds, that misses some of the nuances of the situation in Flint, where a lack of corrosion-control treatment when the city switched to the Flint River in April 2014 allowed lead to leach from aging water pipes.

Snyder initially requested that President Barack Obama declare a major disaster in Flint and provide more than $700 million for infrastructure repairs to pipes and the water system. But Obama turned down that request because federal law only allows for such declarations in the cases of natural disasters, fires or explosions.

“What is happening to the people of Flint, Michigan is a man-made disaster,” Lee said. “Congress has special mechanisms for emergency spending when it is needed. But to date Michigan’s governor has not asked us for any, nor have Michigan’s senators proposed any. Contrary to media reports, there is no federal ‘aid package’ for Flint even being considered.”

The allowance for surgical masks made more sense when scientists initially thought the virus was spread by large droplets. But a growing body of research shows that it is spread by minuscule viral particles that can linger in the air as long as 16 hours.

A properly fitted N95 respirator will block 95% of tiny air particles – down to 0.3 micron in diameter, which are the hardest to catch – from reaching the wearer’s face. But surgical masks, designed to protect patients from a surgeon’s respiratory droplets, aren’t effective at blocking particles smaller than 100 microns, according to the mask maker 3M. A Covid-19 particle is smaller than 0.1 micron, according to South Korean researchers, and can pass through a surgical mask.

The CDC’s recent advice on surgical masks contrasts with another CDC web page that says surgical masks do “NOT provide the wearer with a reliable level of protection from inhaling smaller airborne particles and is not considered respiratory protection”.

A 2013 Chinese study found that twice as many health workers, 17%, contracted a respiratory illness if they wore only a surgical mask while treating sick patients, compared to 7% who continuously used an N95, per a study in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine.

Earlier this month, the national Teamsters Union reported that 64% of its healthcare worker membership – which includes people working in nursing homes, hospitals and other medical facilities – could not get N95 masks.

said Katie Scott, an RN at the hospital and vice-president of the Michigan Nurses Association. Employees who otherwise treat Covid-19 patients receive surgical masks.

That matches CDC protocol, but leaves nurses like Scott – who has read the research on surgical masks versus N95s – feeling exposed.

At Michigan Medicine, employees are not allowed to bring in their own protective equipment, according to a complaint the nurses’ union filed with the Michigan Occupational Safety and Hazard Administration. Scott said friends and family have mailed her personal protective equipment (PPE), including N95 masks. It sits at home while she cares for patients.

“To think I’m going to work and am leaving this mask at home on my kitchen table, because the employer won’t let me wear it,”

News reports from Kentucky to Florida to California have documented nurses facing retaliation or pressure to step down when they’ve brought their own N95 respirators.

In New York, the center of the US’s outbreak, nurses across the state report receiving surgical masks, not N95s, to wear when treating Covid-19 patients, according to a court affidavit submitted by Lisa Baum, the lead occupational health and safety representative for the New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA).

White House to invoke the Defense Production Act, a Korean war-era law that allows the federal government, in an emergency, to direct private business in the production and distribution of goods.

provide health care workers with protective equipment, including N95s masks, when they interact with patients suspected to have Covid-19.

“Nurses are not afraid to care for our patients if we have the right protections,” said Bonnie Castillo, the executive director of National Nurses United, “but we’re not martyrs sacrificing our lives because our government and our employers didn’t do their job.”

But the governor was not budging, telling reporters he would not quit after reportedly telling the state senate leader she would have to impeach him.

Cuomo said he would not resign because he was elected by people not politicians and the system depended on due process.“I’m not going to resign because of allegations,” the governor said. “The premise of resigning because of allegations is actually anti-democratic.”

the governor told Stewart-Cousins he would have to be impeached if his opponents wanted him out of office.

“I think the allegations here are very serious,” she said, “and I do think that an impartial thorough independent investigation is merited and appropriate. And if [the allegations are] accurate and true, I think we have to take action.”Last year, Whitmer was one of many prominent Democrats to back Joe Biden when he denied an accusation, telling CNN: “Just because you’re a survivor doesn’t mean that every claim is equal. It means we give them the ability to make their case. And then to make a judgment that is informed.”

On Sunday prominent national Democrats including the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, who is from New York, and the governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, expressed support for the women who allege harassment and for an investigation run by the New York attorney general, Letitita James.

“Every day there is another account that is drawing away from the business of government,” she said. “We have allegations about sexual harassment, a toxic work environment, the loss of credibility surrounding the Covid-19 nursing home data and questions about the construction of a major infrastructure project.

The Michigan governor said: “I think that there are a lot of American women who have felt how she felt. And I think that’s something that resonates and why we need to take this seriously, and why there needs to be a full investigation, and whatever is appropriate in terms of accountability should follow.

Five women have accused Cuomo of sexual harassment, accusations he denies

“This did not happen. Karen Hinton is a known antagonist of the governor’s who is attempting to take advantage of this moment to score cheap points with made-up allegations from 21 years ago.”

“I understand sensitivities have changed,” Cuomo said. “Behavior has changed. I get it and I’m going to learn from it.”